Robert Downey Jr. is grooving on the great irony of being nominated for a supporting Oscar as Tropic Thunder's Kirk Lazarus, a pretentious Aussie actor who is so Method that he dyes his skin to play a black character.

Bones (Fox, tonight, 8 ET/PT) makes its official move to Thursday with two episodes and two special guests: Andy Richter in the first hour and hockey star Luc Robitaille in the second. In the opener, which was made available for preview, Richter stars as the ringmaster of a small traveling circus that may be housing a murderer. To find out, Bones and Booth go undercover as circus performers a silly conceit, true, but it's so amusingly handled that fans won't mind. In fact, it's worth the sizable suspension of disbelief for the knife-throwing bit alone. As for the second, unpreviewed episode, it's one of those stories where the hero (in this case, Booth) is suspected of murder, making it an equal credibility stretch at best. The victim is a hockey player Booth fought with on the ice, which is where Robitaille fits in.

Sure, there have been a few jokers out there this summer besides the one in The Dark Knight. But Steve Carell, Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have all offered up cinematic frivolity with varying degrees of success. However, their tried-and-true tomfoolery will soon seem as quaint as vaudeville routines as two of the most-anticipated and potentially genre-altering summer comedies in years open within a week of each other this month.

A look at what's new in advertising and marketing. That logoed pen you dole out to potential clients? So incredibly lame when compared with the thousands of other brandable items on display at the Advertising Specialty Institute's trade show last week.

The Associated Press-AOL Money & Finance poll on taxes was conducted March 24 to April 3 by Abt SRBI Inc. The poll is based on telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,002 adults from all states except Alaska and Hawaii, including 863 individuals who had responsibility for filing taxes in their households.

If there were ever a time for Hal Holbrook to be whistlin' Dixie, it is now. The veteran actor, who turns 83 this month, is enjoying his first Oscar nomination. Though he knows "the smart money" may be on his competition, there is a little space to the left of the fireplace mantel in his study where the award would sit just fine.

Sometimes the best thing a show can do is cut and run. After four overheated seasons in Miami, FX's slice-and-dice dramedy Nip/Tuck seemed on the verge of wearing out its TV welcome. It was stuck in a dual death spiral, upping the ante with ever more bizarre surgeries while plodding through an increasingly turgid family soap. What had been an entertaining meditation on the superficiality of beauty became deeply grim and strangely unattractive.